Work of art in the era of technological reproduction, cyber systems and hyper-reality. A vision of media development created by Walter Benjamin, Bill Nichols and Jean Baudrillard.

This article has three heroes: Walter Benjamin, his theory of reproduction and its social consequences; Bill Nichols, who has removed the first conception in the contemporary cultural context defined by a logic of cyber systems, and Jean Baudrillard with his famous simulation theory. Each of them has created his own conceptual apparatus which seems to be necessary for describing some objects of their studies. For example, Walter Benjamin uses such terms as: aura, techniques of the world reproduction, manual and technological reproduction. He also refers to the work of art and its role in industrial society; mass production and consumption and the issue of art authenticity. Bill Nichols elaborates on these problems in the postmodern optics, but takes into consideration three types of factors: a stage of capitalism, political ideologies and dominant philosophy, and the main medium and its ideology of visibility. The main terms of his theory are: a chip and simulation vs. copy and reproduction, an expansion of cyber systems and metaphors of computer imagination, techniques of simulation. Jean Baudrillard has created a simulation theory to portray a character of contemporary media production, the relations between them and the reality they pretend to represent and phenomenon of hyper-reality, a crisis of a representation principle and a new ontology of media images.